This invention relates to a virtual computer system having an I/O device compliant with SR-IOV mounted thereon, for providing a virtual computer.
In the current Internet society, provision of services using computer systems running 24 hours and 365 days is prevailing. Therefore, if a failure occurs on a computer, it is required to recover from the failure as early as possible, thereby resuming the service provision.
If a failure occurs on a computer, a maintenance person investigates a cause of the failure. If the cause of the failure is a failure of a component, it is necessary to replace the failed component by a normal component, and to restart the computer. In order to decrease the time until the recovery from the failure, it is necessary to quickly identify a location of the failed component.
In recent years, a virtual computer in which hardware is virtualized and a plurality of OSs are operated on the virtual hardware has become common, and there is a technology for detecting a failure of a physical I/O device (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-301162 and BladeSymphony “Hardware maintenance agent configuration guide” For BS2000, Hitachi, Ltd., September 2010, p. 10).
On the other hand, as a technology for solving a low I/O performance of the virtual computer, Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) for using one I/O device by a plurality of virtual computers is proposed (see, for example, Intel (trademark) 82599 SR-IOV Driver Companion Guide, Intel, May 2010, Page 8). According to the SR-IOV, one I/O device includes a physical function (PF) assigned to one physical computer and a plurality of virtual functions (VFs) assigned to a plurality of virtual computers. A virtualization module (such as virtual machine monitor (VMM)) executed on a host OS on a physical computer can provide a virtual computer with a VF as a virtual device, and a guest OS on each of the virtual computers uses a VF driver, thereby making access to the VF, and using the I/O device.